


BNF

by bmouse



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fandomy, Gen, M/M, Meta, Their Love Is So
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-10
Updated: 2012-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 21:21:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU where Dean and Castiel meet because they are both BNFs in the Dr. Sexy fandom. Complete with LJ and you know, Dean being somewhat embarrassed by his own interest, but unable to stop writing fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	BNF

**Author's Note:**

> Written for dean_castiel challenge back in 09. Posted for archive.

Funny how it started really. The old golfer boys he'd started out hawking product to wanted their meetings at 5:00pm, always at 5:00pm with him as the junior guy, the up and coming guy last on their schedules, so if they felt like giving him the brush-off they could say something about picking up their brats or getting an early start on the weekend fishing. What that meant was any time he walked into another friendly generic motel room, it was always 7:30 and that doctor show was on. 

Heaven knows what made him start channel surfing after his first big hand-off. He'd called Sammy and his then-girlfriend Cassie to celebrate, but after that all his triumph and energy just bled out. He remembered he was still in Carson, where he didn't know anybody and didn't feel like trotting out cheery happy-go-lucky drunk Dean Winchester to the nearest dive to pat himself on the back. 

He'd sat on the remote and there it was. 

Now this was back in the middle of Season 1 when the show wasn’t so much hitting its stride as trying to find it. Poor Jason Allmann (no relation to the Allman Brothers), who played Dr. (Sexy) Brad Cohen, didn't get much direction besides 'look intense and serious' and the occasional 'dimple at the girl' while the writers went strictly by index through the most popular clichés of General Hospital. When they got bored with that they pulled out the Family Book of Rare and Really Freaky Medical Diseases. 

Seriously, Christ, he could have lived his whole life cheerfully not knowing about botflies and foetus in foetu but he couldn't bring himself to turn it off. Something about the gross-out of it combined with soap opera lighting and the way Alice Chen always clutched her clipboard right below her gorgeously perky breasts. Dean always liked horror movies as a kid. 

It helped even on bad days when something didn't go right and he'd stare moodliy at the same shitty watercolor palm trees on the wall and wonder if maybe he'd be better off as something else. If there was a calling out there for him and he was pissing the years away missing it. If he should have stuck to his old plan and been a con man. 

Yeah he could still go out and use it - that moody pouting look and his old leather jacket with the Zeppelin Tshirt, threadbare and out of place in his suitcase of identical crisp shirts, got him girls. It got him women too. Honestly that was part of the problem sometimes, he felt less like a whole person and more like an arsenal of mannerisms, looks, identities carefully packed away in the trunk of his Impala and taken out to close the deal. 

Dean was a good salesman. He started out early, selling the social workers and the teachers and whomever Dad was temping for at the time the idea that everything was fine so he could keep the family together. That had turned out, more or less. Sammy had Stanford and his books and Dean got to keep the road and Dad... well there was no helping anyone who wouldn't help themselves. He still called, couldn't help but call, but half the time they just talked about the car. 

When he got good enough the car became a problem. Tim, the new 'coordinator' guy, aka 'the one who didn't want to be known as the office secretary' booked him on a plane to patch a supply problem in Atlanta before it percolated in his lame-ass overbleached head that Dean Winchester DID NOT FLY. If Tim was on Dr. Sexy he'd be in a sad-sack subplot for laughs - a fratboy with a bad case of the warts who'd still try to hit it off with one of the nurses. They had a great crop of trainee nurses in Season 2. And yeah, they totally ganked it from House, but Dean was willing to turn a blind eye to the lack of artistic integrity when the other eye got Renee the classic redhead, Mia the fucked-up blonde (intro to a druggie storyline if he ever saw one) and Missy, the brunette from Iowa who was so sweet to everyone it just screamed 'secret tumor.' 

When the little green lights outside his ridiculously tiny Business-Class prison window started streaming into flat ribbons and the unavoidable roar of the jet engines was pounding 'take off, take off, you are about to be trapped three miles above the ground in a giant eggshell-colored tin can' into his brain, he tried to think about the ridiculous divot in Renee's lip, but all his memory could dredge up was the goddamned fanfic. Who knew Sammy was still that sore about the "I love the Smurfs" thing? Yeah, his new girl Jessica was hot - he had eyes, big whoop. Yeah he might have broken the camel's back with the 'spoon' incident but that's totally what he could expect for roping Dean as a ride to some conference and talking his ear off about the intricacies of medical malpractice lawsuits and how that last-minute save in "Confidentiality" was complete BS and could never ever happen. "Confidentiality" was fucking epic TV. Whatever, it would completely pay off somewhere down the line when Sam became Attorney General like he was threatening to and Dean would still have the pictures. 

OK, the goddamned fanfic. It was Dr.Sexy/Mr. Mac the night janitor, buried back in the archives of the **anything_sexy** comm, for which he’d swear the ‘jesus wept’ tag was invented. The fact that Sammy must have scrolled through a couple pages of Alice/Alex (so wrong) and Doc-cest just to find it proved he was a total freak.

Dean felt a little bit like a freak for clicking around after he got over the initial urge to vomit and send his brother a long angry voicemail about said brother’s obvious unrequited yearning for the cock and how that had nothing to do with Dean’s TV habits thankyouverymuch. It was weird, thinking how there was a quasi-secret online society for other people who watched the show, and he was downright relieved to find the simple recap and discussion comms. Even if they were overrun with clueless saps who thought Alice and Brad would hook up this season, it’s like nobody remembers Moonlighting. 

As soon as the craggy stewardess turned her back, he dove for the company laptop and his headphones. The old lady next to him was fast asleep and he hoped for her sake that would continue. Spoilers said ‘gastric bypass and Mia confesses.’ Fun times. 

Sadly that only killed an hour and then he was frowning at the credits, a little dissatisfied. Mia macking on Alex was just…lame. That’s not the way these things went. The radiologist was a twiggy ‘by the book’ foil, overexposed as hell and this was transparently a last-ditch attempt by the actor to stay on. Depressing as it was, somebody was still bound jump all over it and then there’d be more shitty amateur porn on the internet. Thing was, he kind of liked Mia, he knew girls like that, never all of her at once, but hard girls who cursed and outpaced him at shots and had pretty smiles for their chipped teeth. 

The plane was shaking and his mental smut filter was already pretty thin and that was his excuse for thinking that the only way to save that scene was to make a creative substitution. Let’s say Alex for…Missy! Brilliant. Now here was an idea, a classic setup straight out of what you’d call the cinematography of his misspent youth. Well, and sometimes his misspent present - he’s man enough to admit it. 

Another tremor, this time so hard it rattled his tray table. Dean opened a text file.

The rough spot went on for another hour; every time his feet wedged tightly between his briefcase and the seat in front of him, anticipating a brace position, and his stomach tried to get friendly with his lungs on the dips he wrenched his mind back to “her cotton and lace panties, sliding slowly down her tanned thighs…” one keystroke in front of the other. They got through the storm over Alabama. Dean kept typing and didn’t notice. 

When they touched down he had a backache and about 1400 words of irredeemable smut. 

Then because a 4am layover in Tampa (Tim was a dead man), stuffed into uncomfortable seats amid a gaggle of plastic geezerettes was exactly what he needed for his mental health, he brought up LJ in the browser, made an account and posted it. 

So for a while it was good, a little unorthodox as therapy went but all of a sudden Bobby retired to spend more time with the grandkids and Dean was catching an awful lot of planes that fall, trying to pick up the slack. Nice too, getting stuff in his email that wasn’t just chain letters from some hick cousin, clients, or accounting wanting to check something on his invoices. rambleson’s stuff was a bit of a niche market, true, but the ‘nurseporn’ tag and eventual awards category – all him. 

That year the bonus came with a new phone, a sleek thing with a digital keyboard and a lightning-fast network hookup that loaded sexy_picspam in under 30 seconds, even at a diner in Nebraska. The fine and dirty-minded ladies of supplies_closet just came out with a new recslist, God he’d need it go get through this week, and when the waitress asked him what he was smiling about he rolled the phone smoothly back into its belt holster and crooned 'well I’m a Huskers fan, ma'am' in the space of a blink. 

The day before a truly stupendous presentation to a council of old hardasses (one that badly made him wanna pack his old pocketknife, the better to saw off his foot with and do a runner if things went south) Dean stayed up til 3am reading a fic by enochian_sigil. It was a completely, ridiculously overblown character piece elaborating on the seemingly throwaway bit in the latest episode where Alice’s immigrant mom called her Xiaomei over the phone. 

It started off like an anthropologist’s report about Chinese immigrants in Boston, laid out the reasons why Dr. Chen might have done the 'just call me Alice' thing in high school, how her focus in neural rehabilitation therapy was the natural conclusion of her family's acupuncture practice in Shanghai and finally how her breakthrough diagnosis of the pinched nerve in "Hope on Wheels" came from the battered modern translation of Classic of Internal Medicine that she kept in her desk drawer. Halfway through a stupidly competent synthesis about the differences in common diagnostic methods in Eastern versus Western medicine, he jumped out of the chair yelling 'Seriously? Seriously?! Wow, you giant nerd, you do not have a life do you?” and nearly knocked over his beer. Then he sat down and finished it. 

That’s how it started. Dean decided to do what he usually did when he discovered an interesting person in the same line of work, research. If this involved reading all of Sigil’s stuff well, he had time. The rest of it was that same brand of weird, like reports written by someone who was studying people, who kept trying to lift the characters up from their canon cardboardness and plug up the holes in their arcs. Sigils was pretty rare in another way, the gender flag on his profile was checked. 

That kind of took balls, no pun intended. Dean’s was ‘unspecified’ and he got the feeling sometimes that it gave him more of an automatic ‘pass’ for some of his stuff. 

The next day he's bored. There’s nothing else to find but ‘brainy, male, lives in Pittsburgh.’ Time to shit or get off the pot. Come on, he thinks, frowning at the keyboard butterflies are totally out of line here. Charming strangers is 50% of his job. Dean pulls up Sigil’s handle on AIM and says hi. 

There is no private stuff in Dean’s journal. He friends people pretty easily but doesn’t really use his flist, just goes to comms directly. He’s paranoid early on since someone's probably been googling him once a day since ‘googling’ became a word and he’s been scrupulously careful they don’t get anything but the Facebook or LinkedIn, even though the juvie stuff’s 7 years gone and scrubbed. The unforeseen consequence is that there's no blanket of fake-familiarity for his chats with Sigil.

Who never pries exactly, but once in a while Dean mysteriously finds himself recapping his morning along with the newest promo trailer and it’s weird. He wishes there was a post he could link to “Index of Dean Winchester: Family, Asses I’ve Kicked at Work, and a Supplementary Guide to Stuff That’s Totally Been Dealt With And Shouldn’t Be Brought Up (Sammy This Means You)” and have done with it. 

It’s good that month. The show has a break from the heavy stuff, Season 3 is confirmed and the writers are thinking outside the box a little. Sigil has a ridiculously perfect memory for obscure details and a dry sense of humor. They’re both online all the time. Dean feels OK bitching about how he’s gotten tired of fielding questions like “but where’s the Renee/Missy one, the other Renee/Missy one, the one with the pot” from people who weren’t born when he popped his cherry. Sigil suggests he make a ‘strategy meeting’ on his calendar and take the time to get his tags in order. Dean sends him a link to a cat playfully thwapping another cat on the head. 

It’s been a scary number of years since Dean’s tried to build a friendship up from what still amounts to liking the same cartoons. Maybe his instincts are off, because it’s never condescension but he feels like he’s being… humored, sometimes. Could be it’s all in his head. Talking to Sigli he’s never more aware of what he’s missed, feels suddenly acutely cheated out of the breadth of Sammy’s book learning. 

Whatever, he had his own areas of expertise, it made him want to bang out the story of Renee’s disillusionment with the classist biases of the nursing program, framed through her series of used cars. Nothing said ‘rock bottom’ like a secondhand Ford SUV. Sigil would probably get a kick out of it. 

 

******************************

 

Cas, short for Castiel (seriously Castiel, yes. Brother of Michael, Anael and Uriel, are you sure you want to hear more about my parents? ) loved the little garret office cum dorm room that went with his fellowship. He loved the old ironwork on the handle, the gothic curves of the exposed ceiling beams, and the gentle warp of the old glass that cast random sunbunnies in apology for the awful insulation. “You like it because it’s monastic” he’d think. As if the outward projection of serious old-school scholar would somehow rebound and order a mind that still stubbornly wanted to know everything about everything. 

His colleagues would probably laugh to find that ‘monastic’ was actually not ideal for his concentration. It was always noisy at home, with a host of siblings marshaled only by his mother’s clarion shouts from the kitchen. Unless he had some extraneous noise or compulsion to tune out, his mind wandered. That’s even how he wrote it in the “How I Got Into The Show” post his early regular readers wrangled him into doing – “Sheer coincidence, a weekend where I needed 20 more pages before Monday’s review, the wall of silence in the corridor, and Seasons 1 and 2 conveniently on Hulu.” 

Nobody was more surprised than he when come 11pm on Sunday night he clicked ‘Save’ then ‘Close’ on his paper in the first five minutes of “Alex’s Arrythmia” and still wanted to finish the episode. 

His early stuff was eclectic. Something had obviously pinged and now his favorite frame of reference for exploring sample ethics dilemmas or his feelings on health reform or whatever bite-size chunk of knowledge he wanted to scrutinize was the intersection of these ludicrous fictional people. They were so incomplete, maybe that was what made them compelling. 

His LJ was just a convenient backup archive. It had been gathering dust since his undergrad days, long-since defriended into complete obscurity. The last post, some half-baked rambling about Milton’s renegade angels, combined with the pretentious "enochian_sigil" handle, was an embarrassing time-slice back to a messy-haired gawky kid who was good at taking orders and regurgitated the Old Testament to impress that girl who always wore sunglasses to class and claimed to be into ‘demonology.’ 

Now half the time he felt like he was writing to impress rambleson. What he gets is fawning feedback from just about everyone else. Mostly because of how he’s too polite not to leave comments for everything he reads in the fandom. Somebody would then inevitably follow back to his journal, troll, comment, or friend him. It was amazing how many people would potentially share their secrets to a stranger with as little reason as ‘hey I <3 Alice too, write moar please!” 

When his profile starts cutting off ‘friend of’ on account of the volume he thinks things might be getting out of control. Yesterday somebody called him a BNF in the weekly drsexy_newsletter. He’s not so naïve that he has to look it up. Today Cas wakes up to find that Rambles gleefully sent him a “You Know You’re A BNF When…” list. They email pretty regularly now. He smiles through his coffee but by lunch he’s uneasy. That’s still too many people treating his words as gospel. 

A month-long hiatus is announced. Cas knows this is generally how things work but he finds himself agitated without the watching ritual marking the week. To add insult to injury rambleson drops off the map. Cas is vaguely disappointed for a while but the feeling slow-chars itself into outright annoyance after his evening lecture. By the end of the first week he’s quietly sulking, thoughts a-storm with Roman proverbs on “fair-weather friends.” He knows he’s being irrational, Rambles has his own life, he does not owe Cas his time. The resolution to be reasonable and put it out of his mind lasts about four days, then snaps back into full-blown worry like an overstressed cable. He writes “Prolonged absence implies that your company may have finally made good on their threat and sent you to hawk ice-chips in Hell. I assume Verizon coverage is spotty. Do let me know if you need a lift out” on the last post, right under someone saying they’ll be in their bunk. 

In another week he’s worn down to “I’m worried. Let me know you’re all right, please.” 

Two days before the airdate he can’t sleep, curled up on the couch with some comfort reading when his computer crackles with the sound of old cathedral bells. An email. It reads “Sorry, it’s been a shit month. My old man fell off the wagon. ” 

 

******************************

 

The next post in rambleson’s journal is a fic. It is safe for work. It is about Dr. Sexy and his father. 

Dean’s ambivalent. He guesses this counts as ‘personal’ but at the same time it isn’t really. “Son of bitter vet, never feels good enough” is a pretty cliché setup, safe enough for channel 9. He’s one of millions of kids who felt like their purpose was to be an occasional distraction, always calling their dad back from an invisible never-ending war. 

He gets 6 pages of comments on the first day. His favorite is “You are always very kind to the characters. I get the feeling that you would like to step in and save them, given the chance. I’ve always admired that about your writing.” 

On the runway for a flight to Philly he’s fiddling with his phone. He might just down a Dramamine and sleep. He feels all written out, like somebody’s still sweeping his words out of bars and hospital waiting rooms and the visitors lounge at the clinic. 

Dean filters for a familiar @cmu.edu address. The latest message reads “You Know You’re a BNF, When…” 

He grins. “Jerk” he says, quietly and the stewardess smiles when she tells him to turn off his phone.


End file.
